Babylonian soldiers battered the walls of Jerusalem for 18 straight months. Famine stripped the city of all bread. King Zedekiah fled at night through a gate near the royal garden. Chaldean troops chased the king across the plains of Jericho and captured him. The king lost his sons to executioners at Riblah before Babylonian soldiers gouged out his eyes and bound him in bronze fetters.
Babylonian administrative tablets from this period confirm Nebuchadnezzar conducted systematic campaigns to crush western rebellions. Nebuzaradan, captain of the imperial guard, arrived to burn the royal palace in the summer of 586 b.c. His soldiers tore down the stone walls surrounding the city and left only the poorest citizens behind to work the vineyards.
The imperial guard shattered the massive bronze pillars standing at the temple entrance. Each pillar measured 27 feet tall and 18 feet in circumference. The hollow metal walls of these columns were nearly three inches thick. Babylonian soldiers smashed the enormous bronze basin and the 12 bronze bulls beneath it to haul the raw scrap metal eastward to Babylon. The sheer weight of this plundered metal defied calculation.
Empires measure total conquest by the weight of stolen bronze.
This massive extraction of wealth left Jerusalem an empty shell. Nebuzaradan marched 4,600 captives across hundreds of miles of harsh desert terrain toward a foreign capital. Decades of exile awaited this displaced population as the ashes of their former city cooled in the Judean hills. Babylonian king Amel-Marduk eventually released a previous Judean king from his dungeon in 561 b.c.